


5 + 1 Things Sam Yao Knows About Runner Five

by summerjuliet



Category: Zombies Run!
Genre: (everything through Shoot The Runner), F/M, Female Runner Five, extremely brief mention of transphobia and shitty home life, spoilers from s1 to s3m46, traumatic mute Five, you can pry 5+1s from my cold dead hands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-24
Updated: 2017-08-24
Packaged: 2018-12-19 07:17:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11892744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/summerjuliet/pseuds/summerjuliet
Summary: There are lots of things Sam thinks he knows about Runner Five, and one that he's certain of.





	5 + 1 Things Sam Yao Knows About Runner Five

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, I'm 5am trash. Maggie's experience with mutism is based on mine (though extrapolated to a much larger crisis) and the chicken story is partially true (I've never tried to fight an American bobcat). Maggie is the epitome of "Florida Woman" headlines; while I'm sure the rest of the world knows Florida is a godless land, Abel's citizens still have a bit of disbelief that it can't really be as bad as Maggie and Maxine say.

**1\. Runner Five is Alice Dempsey, not Magdalene Reynolds.**

He’s not overly hostile to her when she comes in. That’s not in Sam’s nature. But she runs in, bloodied and bruised from surviving a helicopter crash, and he’s trying not to think about the possibility that some of that blood might have belonged to his girlfriend—

Well, it’s not the best introduction.

They finally get her checked out by Maxine—Doctor Myers, whatever—and calmed down enough to where she can give her name. Well, Maxine’s the one who gets it from her; Sam leaves as soon as she has to get undressed and Evan has a host of runners to deliver the news about Alice to. They knew, of course, but there’d been the tiniest bit of hope that if anyone could return alive and well from the supposed dead, it would be Runner Five.

Not even Simon takes to her like he usually does with the female residents--he actively avoids her. Which is, frankly, more shocking than just about anything else to Sam, to see _Simon_ trying to get away from a woman. And Sam can’t get over the knowing look they’d given one another when they’d been introduced.

(She explains it, one night, when Evan makes them sit down and work it out with Sam to mediate. Simon deflects it with humor, of course, so she’s the one who spills her guts.

“My parents were religious freaks,” She signs, careful to slow down so they can keep up. “When my sister came out, obviously she told them she wanted them to call her Hannah. They threw a fit about wanting their son back and that they’d never call her that. I had to get the heat off of her. Told them that I was changing my name, too, and picked the one I knew would make them the angriest. It stuck.”

That’s all it takes, because from then on, Simon pats her on the back and calls her sweetheart. They’re friends, in a weird sort of way, Runner Three and this new Runner Five.)

**2\. This new Runner Five is a traumatic mute, and that’s understandable, since the apocalypse hasn’t exactly been kind to any of them.**

Those that don’t already know a form of sign language are quick to pick it up, because Runner Five seems to have endless patience and a knack for finding “how to learn” books in the city rubble. Guess looters weren’t really looking for those, but it’s still lucky they hadn’t all been pulled out for kindling. None of them realize, though, that she’s using American Sign Language until they start learning. Maxine really should’ve tipped them off sooner, but she had bigger things on her mind.

“I was in Ireland for a graduation trip when this started. Always wanted to go. I'd made it back to London and was trying to get home when they started shutting everything down.” She pauses, her eyes caught between sorrow and amusement. “Military picked me and Jess—my girlfriend—up, with a lot of others out of the terminal. Took us to a quarantined zone. Picked us up again two days later when we broke back into the airport to try and steal one of the two seaters. Asked us if we knew how to fly. I said no, but damn if I wouldn’t learn, and apparently that’s the kind of attitude they wanted for Mullins Base. That, and being able to smash your girlfriend’s head in with a lead pipe when she goes gray.”

(She’s a traumatic mute who probably won’t ever speak, but Maxine clears her for duty because she’s got her head in the right place and, honestly, who _isn’t_ exhibiting a post-traumatic disorder at this point?

She’s a traumatic mute who hasn’t spoken in well over six months, since the outbreak started. If she were going to "snap out of it", she would’ve done it already.

She’s chained to the trailer hitch of Van Ark’s dodgy Jeep and the son of a bitch threw her headset down in just the right way—he had to have done it on purpose, he must have—to frame her in the center of the camera where Sam can see nothing but her horrified face, her eyes as wide as saucers, her shoulders as she starts to hyperventilate, the way her lips are moving and nothing is coming out and her fingers twitch but Van Ark has her hands chained together tightly enough that she can’t sign. Sam knows she can’t hear him. He heard something snap, but it wasn’t her microphone and it damn well wasn’t the camera, so it must’ve been something in the headphones themselves, something to stop the sound from coming through.

And Sam can do absolutely nothing but watch tears spill out of her eyes as she jogs along behind the Jeep.

He thinks he’s hallucinating when he hears his name in a voice he doesn’t recognize, but then he looks back to Runner Five’s camera, and it’s _her_. Barely above a whisper, but she’s definitely saying his name, and she realizes it the same time he does, because then she’s screaming. His name, Maxine’s, various pleas to _oh god please help_ , _don’t let me die like this_ , _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, what do you want from me?_

The Jeep speeds up. It’s been speeding up and she’s been keeping pace but it’s not easy and she’s already tired. She trips on a branch, almost loses her footing. Her eyes flicker to the chain. Sam realizes what she’s doing a few seconds too late. There’s enough give to wrap it around her neck—it’d snap it if she went limp, hopefully kill her fast. Faster than being dragged for miles.

Paula bursts out of the trees seconds before she can do it and Sam listens to her scream and sob the whole trip home, and can’t shake the dread of how close they came to once more losing Five.)

**3\. Five is in love with Seven, has been ever since she sprinted through the gates and straight into Evan’s arms, and Sam’s happy for them.**

They’re engaged, for whatever that’s worth after the apocalypse. It might be wiser to just go ahead and get married, make it a sure thing, but Five refuses to have a wedding without her sister. And she wants a full wedding. She’s talked about it often enough. It’s what she turns to to calm herself down when she wakes breathless and screaming in the middle of the night or when a car from New Canton rumbles too close and she rubs at faint chain-shaped scars on her wrists.

Evan’s the one who meets her on her way back in after…everything with Van Ark. Sam has been listening to her for hours as the screaming turns from pleas for help to soft, irrational murmurs that fill the silence more than anything. He talks for as long as he can, but she’s utterly non responsive, other than changing direction according to his instructions. He calls Evan. They have to send someone to get her; she’s injured and hardly aware of her surroundings, traumatized and exhausted. She’ll never make it back to Abel alone.

He thinks Evan will send Sara, or Jody, or even Simon to meet up with her—instead, he bursts into the comms shack all kitted out for a run and more disheveled than Sam has ever seen him. “Where do you keep your sweets? I need as many as you can spare—I’m going to get Magdalene.”

“What do you mean, ‘where do I keep the sweets’?!” Chocolate couldn’t fix it, couldn’t ever make any of them forget the way she’d _screamed_.

But Evan fixes him with that ‘head of runners’ glare and Sam cracks open the drawer and Evan scoops as many candies into the bag as he needs. “She’s hypoglycemic. She’s never been out and active for this long. If she has a drop while she’s in the field...”

She’s unconscious when they return, cradled in Evan’s arms and smaller and paler than a human has any right to be. Sam sits by her bed the whole time. Maxine sends Evan out when she sets to tending the various scrapes and injuries Five had gotten over the course of the day (none of them bite-shaped, thank god), saying he’s too close to her to be objective about whether or not she could’ve been bitten. So Sam promises Evan he’ll stay with her until she wakes up, the entire excruciating 32 hours that it takes, and then he ducks out and leaves the two of them alone.

He’s happy for them, he really is.

(But then Evan—Evan!—is a gun runner. Cool, collected, in-charge Evan. And Five doesn’t even react to it, so she must’ve already known. Of course she knew. He’s her fiancé. He’s her fiancé, and he’s leaving Abel in a plane that was supposed to help the township, and he’s offering her the world on a plate.

They would fly away together, to a Caribbean island that’s zom-free, a place where she’s absolutely safe and Van Ark will never touch her again. A place where Hannah can be safe, once they find her in rural Florida. They can live in luxury. No more running, no more giving up her hot showers when she loses at poker. And when the world is safe again, they’ll still have their island and all his money, and they can have the beach wedding she wants.

All she has to do is get in the plane.

She signs something below visual range of her headcam. Evan is careful to do the same. A message for her eyes only. And then she steps back, away from the plane, away from the man she loves, away from a promise of safety.

Evan is gone, but Sam-- _Abel_ still has Magdalene.)

**4\. Magdalene was a cultural anthropology student, which means she’s got keener eyes for people than she lets on, not that it really matters since they’re all in the military now.**

She scoffs one day while watching Sam and Janine rig up part of the comms tower.

“You’re both smarter than I am, honestly,” She says it absently and hands Sam a wrench.

She spends most of her rest periods around the comms shack or helping out at the kids’ dorm, and if Sam didn’t know she was avoiding the bunk she’d shared with Evan for a few months, he’d be flattered by her attention.

“Nah, come on, you’re plenty smart!” He says it out of reflex, but then his mouth doesn’t stop. “Like, you could always tell when Sara was bluffing at poker. No one could ever beat her, until you showed up. And you always know what the kids need--when Dana cried for six hours til you got back in, and none of us could understand that she was looking for her favorite chicken, but you figured it out right away? And the Wilderness Girls love you!”

Magdalene ducks her head. “Right, yeah, we’ll just politely ask Comansys and the zoms to play a hand of poker with me, see who wins that. I mean I can’t do stuff like this, Sam. S’why I’m a runner. I don’t...understand engineering, and all of this. I took statistics in college. Stats! That’s not real math! That’s just...guessing really accurately. And I’ve barely got stats down, compared to what Chris could do.”

He lightly taps the top of her head with the wrench. “Chris was smarter than all of us. You do know I barely passed my classes, right? And you said you made the dean’s list every semester, all four years? Give yourself some credit.”

She sticks her tongue out at him and they all laugh, and for a moment, it’s like the world isn’t overrun with the undead. For a moment, he could almost think he was fixing up the signal tower on campus. And then she starts talking, because Magdalene’s been doing a lot of that lately, and it’s...nice. She tells stories. Things she learned when she was doing field work, writing out oral traditions passed down through generations in the rural areas near where she’d gone to school.

She’s good at telling stories. Good at saying what people need to hear. He can’t remember when he’d realized that was what she was doing. It’s just something in the tone of her voice, or the expressions on her face when she signs, that puts people at ease. The way she always seems to know exactly what to say. He’d brought it up, once, meant it as a compliment, but the way she’d flinched made him acutely aware that it was not a skill she’d desired. He’d remembered how she never spoke of her parents or her childhood, always of Hannah and college.

(Magdalene was a cultural anthropology student, and she often laughed about how nothing interesting ever happened to cultural students; all the crazy stuff happened on archaeological digs. Jess had been an archaeology major.

But Magdalene is standing under a covered walkway in the middle of the forest, back to back with Nadia, as some kind of very large animal stalks them, and Sam can’t get a good look at it until it drops down in front of them and--

And Magdalene is laughing. It’s a big cat, slowly stalking forward, as Magdalene gently nudges Nadia behind her.

“Is that--is that a lynx?” Sam barely breathes.

Magdalene stomps her foot on the wood beneath her and lunges towards the lynx, still laughing. “It’s a bobcat, Sam! God, you had me worried.”

She picks up her trusty metal baseball bat and swings. It doesn’t kill the lynx--bobcat, whatever--but it stuns it, knocking its head to the side long enough for Nadia to start moving to safety. Sam watches through a combination of Nadia’s headcam and Magdalene’s as Magdalene, sweet and gentle Magdalene, drives the lynx backwards until it actually flees from her.

And then they have bigger problems, because Veronica McShell is there, and isn’t happy about Magdalene scaring her test subject out into the wilds. Magdalene doesn’t seemed phased in the least.

Sam finally asks, when they have a moment: “What the hell were you thinking?!”

“We had those in Florida! I mean, smaller, but basically the same thing. Friend of mine had chickens; bobcats would come and make off with the chickens at night, so when we’d go out at dusk to round ‘em up and put them back in the coop, we’d always take baseball bats, in case of--you know, coyotes, bobcats, wild dogs, lots of stuff.” She’s smiling, he can hear it in her voice. “Sam, I’ve fought, like, four of those off with a baseball bat before. I mean, not four at one time, but still. They’re really not that dangerous.”

He’s not sure why he starts laughing, but he does, a bit hysterically, because Magdalene loves to play games with her life, and what would any of them do if they lost her? What would he do if he lost her?

What comes out of his mouth is not a half-joking reprimand to not do anything stupid, but instead a whispered, “Maggie.”)

**5\. Maggie is a good person, there’s no doubt about that, not after seeing her surrounded by a horde of kids begging for a bedtime story.**

Kids love Maggie. Maggie loves kids. She’s at her happiest when she’s supervising recess, or working in the nursery, because people are still having babies even in the apocalypse. There’s a way that she smiles, a tone of voice she uses, that has the whole of the playground listening to her and obeying without question. A gentleness.

Sam’s...not great with kids. He knows that. He’s terrified of holding babies, because if he drops it, it’s just--it just dies. But he doesn’t mind helping out if it’s with Maggie.

It’s got to be some kind of ingrained, automatic response to seeing someone holding a child. Something flutters in his chest as he looks up from the book he’s leafing through for the hundredth time to see her holding one child on her hip, another clinging to her hand, golden hair caught in the sun. She’s been bleaching it blonde, lately; keeps the lice from taking root, she claims. It’s good to see her so relaxed and in her element. Like the shirt she’s wearing doesn’t still have old bloodstains on it.

As the sun starts to set, she herds the kids back to their dorm. Sam follows, and shrugs when she raises a brow at him, because he’s hardly the only adult that likes to hang around when Maggie starts telling stories. It’s a whole-body thing, for her. She’s up on her feet, moving around, acting out all the parts as she recounts Sleeping Beauty (it’s a fan-favorite). Several of the children jump up to slay her when she becomes a dragon.

And when she’s Aurora, asleep for a hundred years, Sam’s the one who kisses her awake.

He regrets it as soon as her eyes open, because it’s usually one of the children, and God, she still misses Evan, it hasn’t been that long since he left her, and everything with Paula and Maxine, and he really should’ve asked first and he can’t actually remember how he got to her and she’s still just staring at him.

She brushes her lips across his when she stands, too brief to even be called a kiss, and the breath in his chest catches again.

Maggie pivots to face him after the story is over and the children have been sent to bed. She doesn’t look angry, per se, but his stomach is still tied in knots.

“Sam Yao,” She says, voice soft, hands on her hips. “I’d appreciate it if you asked me before the next time you kiss me.”

“I’m sorry, I just--I don’t know why I did that, honestly, it just seemed like a good idea, and I know it was rude and a complete mistake, and it’s not going to happen again--” He can’t seem to stop looking at his shoes until she gently places her hands on his cheeks and tilts his head up to make eye contact with her.

She’s a good head shorter than he is. Her eyes light up with laughter that she’s barely holding back. “ _Sam._ I'm not saying you can't kiss me again.”

And then it clicks and he’s pretty sure his heart stops for a good ten seconds because he also forgets how to breathe for long enough that her brows start to knit together in worry, but then he figures it back out and also remembers how to talk. “Oh. _Oh._ Can I--”

Maggie’s on her tiptoes to press her lips to his before he can even get the words out.

(Maggie’s a good person, and Maggie’s his friend, and a little bit more than friends, even if they’re both hesitant to put a label on it. The kids have really done that for them, because Dana snuck out of the dorm to ask Maggie to tuck her in and caught them making out like teenagers. It hadn’t been his finest moment. It had only gotten worse when the rest of the township found out. Even Owen, apparently appointing himself Maggie's older brother, had threatened to hurt him if he ran off and left her.

Maggie is putting her body between Travis and Jody, glaring up at him. Or Sam assumes she’s glaring. He can’t actually see her face, but he can see the way Travis sighs, and he sees the way Maggie raises her gun--

Her gun.

She never uses her gun. Prefers a melee approach, because the zoms just get squishier the more time passes, and she’s damned good with it, too. But now she’s pulling a gun on a man from the Ministry, who just dumped blood on her, who has been trying to kill her and Jody all day.

The gun fires. Travis doesn’t flinch, but he’s not dead, either. Maggie’s head camera shifts. “Next time, I’m not going to miss.”

Maggie doesn’t miss. It’s not something she does. They've all seen her at target practice with Janine. Her accuracy is terrifying. Even Janine had doubted her when she'd attributed it to simply having lived her whole life in Florida. But Sam doesn't have time to think about the threat in her voice, because there's a thousand other things happening.

The next time he manages to look back at Maggie’s camera, she’s poised to blow Simon Lauchlan’s head clean off his shoulders, even as Simon greets her with an audible leer and a “Hey, sweetheart.”)

**6\. No matter what happens, she’ll always come back to him.**

She comes back when she’s been chained to a trailer hitch; when Van Ark did...God-knows-what to her; after two planes crash with her in them. She comes back bloodied and bruised and muddied and exhausted. It doesn’t matter what’s happened to her, what state she’s in; Five comes back.

And Abel needs her. He needs her. They all need her, because somehow, in the time she’s been with them, Magdalene Reynolds has followed in Alice Dempsey’s footsteps and become the heart of the township. Sam’s not really sure what would happen if...if something should happen to her. He’s not certain the whole place wouldn’t just go up into flames.

He knows this about her, with a surety he’s never known anything before. She will always, always come back. She has to come back.

He knows this, that is, until she’s fighting Jody off with a fierceness he’s never seen in her, even as he begs her to listen, calls her “love” and “sweetheart” and all the things that have caught in his throat before, trying to say something--anything--that will cut through the mind control. She slams Jody back into a tree and then...and then Maggie is gone.

(When she comes back to him, it is with her pupils blown wide, a smile too broad to be natural, and an axe in her hands.)


End file.
